This brilliant 2006 album from Agalloch marked a quantum leap for the band, who had already created a buzz for themselves with their previous release, The Mantle. Their earlier releases blended together black metal, Godspeed-style post rock, fragile folk music, and majestic slow motion heaviness into a highly evocative style that didn't sound like anything else happening at the time, but with Ashes Against The Grain, the Portland, OR quartet move into another realm that has just as much in common with old school shoegazer atmospheres as it does with the arty black metal that Agalloch had pioneered. The album opens with "Limbs", and the first minutes of this monolith deliver a melodic sludge wave that is as dreamily gorgeous as anything that Justin Broadrock has done with Jesu. It eventually gives way to a dark piano interlude though, and then plunges into slow, super dramatic black metal with a somber central melody and deep, raspy vocals, and the ending of the song turns into a moody metalgaze coda, again reminding me of Jesu, slow and somber and super melodic but heard through a darker, black metal informed lens. The next song "Falling Snow" picks up in speed and continues the shoegazey black metal, awesome rock drumming moving the amazing melodic hooks and crushing riffs forward, effects-soaked guitars laying down emotional, almost poppy melodies, and about halfway through the clean vocals kick in for the first time and it takes my fucking breath away, sounding like later-era Katatonia but with a more overt indie rock edge. Jesus, "Falling Snow" is easily one of the catchiest metal songs ever, if it weren't for those blackened hissing vocals you could probably pass this off as some long-lost, unusually heavy '90's shoegazer band.

"This White Mountain On Which You Will Die" is a brief bit of beautiful ambience, made up of ominous industrial loops and gauzy distortion, kinda like a flash of Eluvium or Tim Hecker style prettiness, and it moves right into the folky "Fire Above, Ice Below", a slow moving 10+ minute epic that shifts from dark strum to epic builds a la Mono accompanied by lovely vocal harmonies. The last quarter of the album is taken up by a three part suite titled "Our Fortress Is Burning", which begins with a proggy piano-driven instrumental, builds into a heavy hypnotic indie dirge with some searing psychedelic soloing, and then liquifies into a storm of droning feedback, ambient metal powerchords, heavy amplifier rumble, and swirling melody that closes the album. A masterwork of progressive, atmospheric metal - all throughout these songs I'm reminded of everything from Opeth to Jesu to Catherine Wheel to Katatonia to Mogwai and Godspeed You Black Emperor, but Agalloch doesn't particularly sound like any one of these bands.